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A Samaritan State Revisited: Introduction

A Samaritan State Revisited
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table of contents
  1. Contents
  2. List of Abbreviations
  3. Acknowledgements
    1. Introduction
  4. Part 1 Entering the Aid World,1950–1960
    1. 1 Encounter and Apprenticeship: The Colombo Plan and Canadian Aid in India, 1950–1960
    2. 2 “Reasonably Well-Organized”: A History of Early Aid Administration
    3. 3 Developing the World in Canada’s Image: Hugh Keenleyside and Technical Assistance
  5. Part 2 Development, Diplomacy, and Trade, 1953–1991
    1. 4 “A One Way Street”: The Limits of Canada’s Aid Relations with Pakistan, 1958–1972
    2. 5 One Size Fits All? Canadian Development Assistance to Colombia, 1953–1972
    3. 6 Samaritanos canadienses?: Canadian Development Assistance in Latin America during the Trudeau Years
    4. 7 “Trotsky in Pinstripes”: Lewis Perinbam, CIDA, and the Non-Governmental Organizations Program, 1968–1991
  6. Part 3 Imagery and Symbolism
    1. 8 Building a Base: The Growth of Public Engagement with Canadian Foreign Aid Policy, 1950–1980
    2. 9 Pictures in Development: The Canadian International Development Agency’s Photo Library
    3. 10 “Tears Are Not Enough”: Canadian Political and Social Mobilization for Famine Relief in Ethiopia, 1984–1988
  7. Part 4 The Political Economy of Canadian Aid, 1980–2018
    1. 11 Canadian Development Assistance to Latin America
    2. 12 CIDA and Aid to Africa in the 1990s: A Crisis of Confidence
    3. 13 A Samaritan State?, Canadian Foreign Aid, and the Challenges of Policy Coherence for Development
  8. Conclusion
    1. 14 Concluding Reflections: Beyond Aid
  9. Bibliography
  10. Contributors
  11. Index

Introduction

David Webster and Greg Donaghy

Over the past two decades, Canadian international history has slipped its traditional North Atlantic moorings. Studies of Canada’s postwar relationships with a waning United Kingdom or an ascendant United States have faded in popularity, replaced with a stream of publications on relations with the decolonized states of Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, countries whose citizens increasingly comprise the population of contemporary Canada.1

The history of Canadian foreign aid, or official development assistance (ODA), however, remains a laggard. Reflecting the long-established tradition of Canadian missionary histories, the field favours their secular successors as they fled churches into the postwar volunteer sector, especially at the United Nations and the Canadian University Service Overseas (CUSO).2 Although government aid agencies interacted with those groups, Ottawa’s ODA efforts have received much less attention. Yet Canada’s aid history was a complicated business, shaped by a broad range of forces, both internal and external. That history is only beginning to be written. This book seeks to enrich that story, while bringing Canada into global conversations on the history of development.3

Keith Spicer’s pioneering study, A Samaritan State? External Aid in Canada’s Foreign Policy, remains the touchstone, even as it passes its fiftieth anniversary.4 Though a careful analyst, Spicer was a partisan in the debates he described and an advocate for doing aid differently. Other early histories of Canadian aid were prepared by stakeholders too. A classic example is the collection edited by Cranford Pratt in 1994, Canadian International Development Assistance Policies: An Appraisal, which already looked back to a lost golden age of Canadian aid.5 David Morrison’s Aid and Ebb Tide is the dominant institutional history of Canadian aid and of its major instrument from 1968 to 2013, the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA). Part policy history, part administrative history, in the end, Aid and Ebb Tide is neither.6 Its focus on public statements of high policy leaves little room for the mundane, yet important, task of describing exactly how Canadian aid was conceived, administered, and delivered.

In the fall of 2016, Global Affairs Canada and the history departments of Carleton and Bishop’s universities hosted a symposium on the history of Canadian foreign aid. It seemed appropriate on the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Spicer’s A Samaritan State? to invite a new generation of historians and political scientists to reflect on the broad ideological and institutional origins of Canada’s ODA in the 1950s, as well as specific themes in its evolution and professionalization after 1960. This volume is the result. Historians are beginning to look more carefully at Canada’s aid history, a move that is part of a global turn to examine the evolution of development more seriously. In Canada, they are helped by improved access to archival sources, including voluminous project files detailing the history of Canadian overseas development assistance, which for many years were not easy to access. Non-governmental sources from private collections are also becoming more available.7

Studying Canadian aid history requires grappling with the common notion that Canada has acted as, in the title of both Spicer’s volume and this one, a Samaritan state concerned mostly with doing good by helping the world’s poorest. Spicer wrote with few illusions, rejecting his own title’s implied premise. The image of selfless Samaritan, he argued, was myth that served no one. “Canada launched her development aid programme in 1950 with virtually no policy aim,” he began, “beyond a lively anti-Communist instinct and an exhilarating vision of a free, multi-racial Commonwealth.”8

In revisiting the concept of Canada as a “Samaritan state,” this volume’s contributors see Canadian government policy goals as much more important than pure altruism in shaping Canadian ODA. Defining the “national interest” is a tricky thing. Yet most authors here conclude that federal government perceptions of Canadian interests were the major influence on Canadian aid policy and practice. Talk of aid as altruism came later, aimed partly at building public support for aid by painting Canada as a “Samaritan” in the eyes of Canadians and the world. This image, built as much by non-governmental actors as by government, has certainly boosted Canada’s global image, even as Canada’s per capita aid figures often trailed those of other donors.

Policy papers, administrative reforms, and operational adjustments abounded and multiplied as the aid program grew from infancy into adulthood, at a time when, its early planners had hoped, it should be entering retirement. But aid shows no sign of ending. The need is clearly as great as ever, though its aims and means have shifted over the years. One of this book’s questions is how clear and coherent these changing aims and strategies have been.

Authors find continuity in themes, but less coherence in implementation. In many ways donor and recipient interests dovetailed, allowing a proliferation of aid and aid structures. This was often offset, however, by an uneasy tension between the stress recipient governments placed on poverty reduction and industrialization, and the emphasis donor governments put on global stability. Should aid help the poorest—a Samaritan approach—or did it also aim to win allies for the West in the Global South, maintaining political, commercial, and cultural trade ties in a post-colonial age?

Canada joined many others in entering the field of development assistance in the late 1940s and 1950s. The venture built on postwar relief efforts in Europe, especially the massive multilateral mission by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) that carried the idea of orderly planning from war into peacetime.9 Canada sent aid both multilaterally, through the United Nations and its agencies, as well as bilaterally to favoured countries, especially in the Asian Commonwealth. It pledged both technical assistance (experts, scholarships, and skills transfer) and capital aid (money for major development projects). From time to time, Ottawa increased the volume. Within the Colombo Plan, the Commonwealth’s aid scheme for Asia, recipient governments drew up their own development plans and donors pitched in to projects of their choice, sometimes in exchange for the chance to “brand” them—a Canada dam here, a Canada bridge there. Aid was “tied” to Canadian products, serving as economic stimulus at home. If India needed tractors or Burma needed rail cars, and no Canadian company made them, then Canada would not give them as aid.

Still, Canada made plenty of things, and was willing to send them to Asia—at least to those parts that were non-communist and, most especially, Commonwealth members. During the 1950s, Canadian aid was heavily concentrated on India, Pakistan, and Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in a way future governments seeking to focus aid on a small number of countries might envy. In the first fifteen years of Canada’s aid program (1950–65), 95 per cent of Canadian assistance went to Asian Commonwealth member countries.10 Amidst this activity, policy sometimes seemed a secondary consideration, which made aid administration and project selection more freewheeling and creative, and more open to recipient government priorities. Ottawa left the big picture to the United Nations, its aid programs distinct but conceived as part of a broader multilateral effort—not a bad summary of how Canadians saw their foreign relations as a whole.

Yet Canada’s early aid program was still a complicated business, shaped, as the first three chapters in this collection demonstrate, by a range of unexplored internal and external factors. The focus of Jill Campbell-Miller’s opening chapter on aid to India is not Ottawa but New Delhi. Her perspective reflects the pioneering work of US historian David Ekbladh on postwar modernization in the Global South, as well as her own extensive research in detailed Canadian project files. Campbell-Miller dismisses explanatory models that characterize the countries of the Global South as passive, neo-colonial recipients of Northern largesse. Rather, she sees foreign aid as global dialogue. Her closely argued account of the origins of Ottawa’s commitment to the Colombo Plan explains how unprepared its officials and politicians were to venture into this novel field. India’s colonial development experiences, which lingered into the 1950s, and its fierce postwar ambitions, she contends, did as much, if not more, than Ottawa to define Canadian aid to India.

Greg Donaghy’s chapter traces how bureaucratic structures created to deliver Canadian capital and technical assistance left a lasting imprint on the shape of Canadian ODA. It amends the traditional view that the aid program was poorly conceived and chaotically managed. Administrative arrangements were an innovative experiment in keeping with the novelty of the aid program itself. Admittedly, dividing the aid mandate between the departments of External Affairs and Trade and Commerce during the 1950s generated interdepartmental rivalries. But at the same time, division created space to allow a unique organizational culture to flourish, especially under administrator R. G. “Nik” Cavell. The International Economic and Technical Cooperation Division, erected within Trade and Commerce in September 1951, skirted traditional notions of hierarchy, adopted a “can-do” ethos, and nurtured long-term expansionist ambitions. In a sense, the “organizational essence” that underpinned Canadian aid until the late 1980s was rooted in the imperfect bureaucracy of the 1950s.11

Equally important, and too often overlooked in the literature, Canada’s aid program was formed through dialogue with the global community. This volume’s third chapter, by David Webster, explores the UN career of Hugh Keenleyside to underscore this point. A Vancouver native with a PhD from the University of British Columbia, Keenleyside joined the Department of External Affairs in 1929, rose quickly, and became deputy minister of the Department of Mines and Resources in 1947. When he joined the UN’s technical assistance work in 1950, he brought his faith in social democracy—especially its Canadian variant—government intervention, and economic modernization to bear on the UN’s expanded aid program as it established its character in the 1950s. Simultaneously, Keenleyside’s high-profile presence in New York legitimized UN aid operations in Ottawa, encouraging a Canadian aid program with a strong financial and political commitment to a global development model distinct from the one pursued by Washington.

By the late 1950s, Canada’s aid program had broadened its focus beyond its South Asian origins. A growing volume of Ottawa’s aid was directed through the United Nations, the World Bank, and other multilateral organizations. Requests for help from newly independent states in the Caribbean and Africa prompted the creation of more programs. Moreover, domestic pressure to respond to demands from French Canada for a foreign policy reflecting Canadian biculturalism spawned cultural, educational, and economic aid packages for francophone West Africa and Latin America. As diplomats in External Affairs established relations with the states emerging from European colonialism into independence, they grasped the implications of these changes for Canada’s overall foreign policy and jockeyed for control over aid allocations with their rivals in Trade and Commerce. In 1960, Progressive Conservative prime minister John Diefenbaker moved all aid operations to a new External Aid Office (EAO). Under the leadership of senior diplomat Herb Moran, it reported directly to the secretary of state for external affairs.

Even as the EAO wrestled with its sprawling mandate, the intellectual climate shifted. Almost overnight, aid scattered in an ad hoc fashion over poorer parts of the globe became development assistance, a structured and often multilateral approach that marshalled technical and capital assistance, trade and financial policy, and coordinated donor support into a complex and long-term campaign for social change and economic growth. Few contemporary observers listed economic development in the Global South as an international priority after the Second World War, development economist Max Millikan observed in 1968. But now, he continued, it was “inconceivable that it would be left off anyone’s list. The developed countries for their part are coming increasingly to view it both as in their national interest and as part of their world responsibility.” Moreover, he continued, there was “growing recognition that development is a highly complex and multi-faceted process requiring simultaneous action on many fronts covered by many disciplines.”12

The life stories of such early development economists as Benjamin Higgins, a Canadian who advised multiple countries on development strategies, illustrate how aid was professionalized and bureaucratized alongside the emergence of a new field of development economics.13 The field promoted notions of government planning within capitalist economic structures, and built on previous colonial and post-colonial talk of modernization.14 Planning meant increased control by both Southern governments over their people and Northern governments over economic directions.15 In Eva-Maria Muschik’s words, it was a shift from “the idea of helping countries help themselves to a more paternalist approach that focused on ‘getting the work done’ on behalf of aid recipients.”16 The crystallization of this “modernization theory” came with Walt Rostow’s Stages of Growth: A Non-Communist Manifesto, which sketched alternative development trajectories, all based on Western models, championed as universally applicable with the correct injection of capital and expertise.

The transformation was driven in part by a shift in US policy: president John F. Kennedy’s administration established the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in November 1961, embraced modernization theory, and urged US allies to follow suit by expanding and professionalizing their own programs.17 In May 1968, egged on by its reformist director-general, Maurice Strong, Liberal prime minister Pierre Trudeau transformed the EAO into CIDA. In forming the agency, Trudeau’s government signalled its intention to become a major player in global aid, an ambition marked by a proliferating roster of recipient countries and a rising ODA budget. The launch of the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in June 1970 underlined this determination to lead on aid policy and aid thinking.18

The evolving shape of Canadian aid administration echoed and amplified global trends, epitomized in the work of a UN-backed Commission on International Development chaired by former Liberal prime minister Lester B. Pearson. The result was Partners in Development, a major report launched in 1970 that re-imagined aid in ways better structured to the needs of developing countries and less tethered to the political twists and turns of donors. Famously, it set 0.7 per cent of GDP as the amount that wealthier states ought to spend on development assistance.

More important, Pearson’s report recast aid as a cooperative endeavour between North and South, serving the interests of donor and recipient, and transcending the dichotomy between them. Northern interest in global stability was best served by aid that aimed to reduce poverty and spur industrialization—the goal of Southern governments. And, the report implied, vice versa. Governments and peoples on both sides of the North-South divide, in this vision, became “partners in development”—itself a concept being transformed into humanity’s “mission statement” and a “global faith” for the later twentieth century.19 CIDA too was supposed to mark a shift from “give away” aid to partnership.20 Left unanswered was the question of whether development assistance also had neo-colonial dimensions that aimed to recast Southern societies in the image of Northern models.

Under Strong and his successor Paul Gérin-Lajoie, CIDA became almost a state within a state. The agency seemed to carry the potential for transformative change. Like the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Swedish International Development Agency (SIDA), both founded in 1965, it offered room for thinking about development differently. Its emergence reflected a shift in the anthropology of international development organizations, which became more bureaucratic, while simultaneously opening spaces for exploring the explosion of new work in agriculture, health, and other specialized fields.21 CIDA hit the ground running. Its contribution to the Trudeau government’s foreign policy review in 1969–70, a booklet simply titled International Development, insisted boldly that “for the first time in the history of the world, the accumulated wealth and technology of the affluent societies is sufficient to make possible the eradication of widespread endemic poverty.”22 It pledged to raise ODA; untie it from purchases made in Canada; target 80 per cent of aid to “countries of concentration”; and to deliver more funds through multilateral channels. It did not accomplish all these goals, but it did position CIDA as a voice calling for ODA to be driven first and foremost by humanitarian motives.

Yet aid often still aimed to serve the national interest. Ryan Touhey’s chapter on Pakistan, India’s near neighbour and bitter rival, pointedly asks what that aid meant for Canada. His grim answer: not much. To support Pakistani development and win political influence in Karachi, Ottawa spent some $230 million dollars on aid to Pakistan by 1965, making Canada the country’s second largest donor. Increasingly sharp differences over Kashmir, nuclear non-proliferation, and the Cold War slowly woke Canadian policy makers up to the fact that fifteen years of aid purchased little influence. Trapped within the existing dynamic, Canadian diplomats in Pakistan and External Affairs squirmed uncomfortably as government-sponsored rioters targeted Canadian diplomatic premises in Karachi and Islamabad, but proved incapable of responding decisively. Only in 1971, following a war in South Asia that upset the geopolitical landscape, did Ottawa finally act, sharply reducing its stake in Pakistan.

Canadian aid often aimed to open doors for Canadian trade and investment, too. An example is provided in Stefano Tijerina’s study of Canadian aid to Colombia from the 1950s to 1970s. Like Campbell-Miller, Tijerina is influenced by an American model, Emily Rosenberg’s notion of the “promotional state,” which marshals its political and economic resources to advance the interests of its domestic private sector corporate allies. Though Latin America was not a historic Canadian priority, as competition within the region’s modernizing economy grew stronger, Tijerina argues, Ottawa acted to preserve space for Canadian business to manoeuvre in the region. Diplomatic and trade support in the 1950s, evident in “goodwill” ministerial missions and arms sales, gave way in the 1960s and 1970s to “opportunistic” ODA, designed to safeguard Canada’s market share in Colombia.

Tijerina’s view is partly echoed in Asa McKercher’s chapter on Pierre Trudeau’s efforts to engage Latin America after his election in April 1968. Skeptical of Canada’s postwar internationalism, Trudeau wanted policy rooted in Canada’s economic interests, making trade and investment opportunities important factors determining aid allocations. But McKercher allows for other influences as well, noting the government’s awareness of humanitarian need and its ideological enthusiasm for regional modernization and development. More important, in a chapter that focuses on aid to authoritarian Chile and revolutionary Cuba, McKercher explores the growing impact of Canadian civil society actors motivated by human rights concerns in shaping aid policies and allocations.

Measured as a percentage of GDP, Canadian aid under Trudeau reached 0.54 per cent in 1978, a number never again matched despite repeated government pledges to attain Pearson’s target of 0.7 per cent.23 If Canada’s ODA had a pinnacle, this was it. Ironically, under Michel Dupuy, the veteran diplomat who replaced Paul Gérin-Lajoie as CIDA head in 1977, the agency’s autonomy was slowly curbed as other departments harnessed its large budgets to broader foreign policy goals. Commercial considerations, in particular, increasingly came to the fore, even as CIDA reinforced its ties to Canada’s growing community of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), which had long underpinned CIDA’s public support.

Kevin Brushett delves more deeply into CIDA’s public engagement work in the 1970s, an era he romanticizes as a “new golden age.” His subject is Lewis Perinbam, a legendary “guerrilla bureaucrat,” who ran CIDA’s outreach programs for two decades. Born in Malaysia, educated in Scotland, and coming of age in Canada, Brushett’s cosmopolitan Perinbam embodies the humane internationalist ideal.24 Hired in 1969 to establish a division to engage Canadian NGOs, Perinbam transformed his original $5 million operation into CIDA’s $323 million Special Branch Program over the next two decades, pragmatically branching out to engage business, industry, and youth. Elevated to CIDA vice-president, Perinbam proved innovative and effective in overcoming the inherent tensions between a government aid agency committed to the existing liberal economic order and more critical NGOs.

Domestic civic engagement, national identity, and public imagery were all part of Canada’s development project right from the start. In Chapter 8, Ted Cogan sets the stage for a discussion of aid’s symbolic character with an overview of the Canadian public’s engagement with aid from 1950 to 1980, an era of sustained if episodic expansion. He flips the traditional lens on how civil society influenced aid policy—especially evident in this volume’s chapters by McKercher and Laura Macdonald—on its head, asking instead how governments peddled foreign aid to their voters. Initially, he suggests, the array of complex economic and political forces behind the Colombo Plan made a clear narrative elusive. By the mid-1950s, however, Ottawa was promoting aid as a Canadian vocation, variously tied to the country’s moral values, its shifting Commonwealth identify, or its internationalism. Yet popular support for aid waxed and waned with the country’s economic fortunes, despite the increasingly sophisticated apparatus adopted by CIDA in the 1970s to enlist Canadian voters in its fight for development. “Expansion,” Cogan concludes, “proved easier than consolidation.”

Sonya de Laat’s approach is more theoretical and more critical. Her chapter explores the evolution of CIDA’s world-class photographic library, which began in the 1960s as an ad hoc collection of images used mostly to brief new employees on the agency’s work and living conditions in the unfamiliar Global South. CIDA expanded its collecting activities in the 1970s, commissioning its own photographers to record material for public outreach and education activities. The International Development Photo Library (IDPL), as the collection was named in 1987, included 150,000 images by some of Canada’s best photographers when it stopped collecting in 2010. De Laat tackles the IDPL, armed with a well-honed theoretical apparatus that locates the conventions of postwar development photography within their broader history of humanitarian images. CIDA employed a careful combination of negative and positive images, she argues, to cast Canada as “a caring and helpful nation.” It was an image immune to political and policy changes, and one intended to bolster uncritical support for CIDA’s work. “Samaritan” images were central to government aid messaging.

The effort was only partly successful. CIDA has, despite its best efforts, come under sustained attack for misdirected aid and grandiose projects. Right-leaning critics denounced it as profligate and corrupt, while their left-leaning counterparts attacked its approach as neo-colonial.25 Certainly, many aid projects have failed, and skepticism toward CIDA went hand in hand with increasing skepticism about the global aid industry.

While Ottawa’s rhetorical commitment to aid rarely flagged, its resources did. Canada’s aid to GDP ratio briefly recovered to 0.5 per cent in 1988, as Progressive Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney’s government signalled its intention to work closely with governments in the Global South. Mulroney re-oriented aid to focus on strengthening civil society, helping the poorest, and promoting “women in development,” goals stressed during the tenure of CIDA president Margaret Catley-Carlson. Parliamentary support for this line shone through in the strong recommendations of a 1987 report by the House of Commons Committee on External Affairs and International Trade, For Whose Benefit? Dubbed the Winegard report after its chair, William Winegard, the report insisted that aid should serve “the needs of the poorest countries and people.”26 This expression of altruism as aid’s purpose hardly reflected Canadian aid policy, but as funds disappeared, the theme became increasingly dominant and was formally entrenched in the Official Development Assistance Accountability Act of 2008.27

Winegard’s strong support for Canadian foreign aid reflected the public reaction to the Ethiopian famine during the early 1980s. As Nassisse Solomon argues in her chapter on Canada’s response to the African food crisis, the mid-1980s represent a singular moment in Canadian aid history. Like de Laat, Solomon explores aid imagery, especially the horrific images that emerged from famine-stricken Ethiopia in the fall of 1984. She is interested too in the political response from Mulroney’s government and its successful effort to mobilize a broad coalition of Canadians in an immediate and widespread relief campaign. Solomon’s Canada was indeed a “Samaritan State,” at least until the hard facts in the Horn of Africa—brutal cold war politics, civil war and corruption, and aid’s failure to show results—dampened popular enthusiasm. And finally, Solomon is interested in memory, wondering how the images of the 1980s inured later generations of Canadians to African distress, defining Ethiopia, and by extension the whole continent, as irredeemably broken.

Figure 0.1

Canadian Aid as Percentage of Gross National Income.

By the late 1980s, with the country’s compassion exhausted, CIDA was vulnerable. In a Decima survey conducted in 1985, 50 per cent of respondents thought that aid was at the right level, whereas only 24 per cent wanted it to increase and 17 per cent judged it too high. Alarmingly, however, the highest level of respondents identified churches and NGOs rather than CIDA as making the major contribution to development.28 There was not much political cost for governments that wanted to reduce Canada’s involvement in international development.

Such a cutback began under Mulroney in 1989–92. Reductions in Canadian ODA reflected both a desire to trim deficits and the decreasing salience of aid as the Cold War sputtered to an end and the Global South ceased to be an arena of superpower contestation. Mulroney also aligned Canadian foreign policy more closely with Republican president Ronald Reagan’s United States. Global trends after the Cold War made aid increasingly conditional on the neo-liberal structural adjustment programs championed by the international financial institutions (the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund) and major donor states. Under its president, Marcel Massé, CIDA embraced the free market “Washington consensus” that joined the largest international financial institutions and the US Treasury Department in pushing governments in the Global South to deregulate their economies. African, Asian, and Latin American governments were asked to reduce public spending and stress market-based policies. In a reflection of Canadian trade goals, CIDA prioritized more middle-income countries such as Indonesia and China as major recipients, while cutting out lower-income countries like Tanzania, once a favourite development partner.

Mulroney also began to dismantle the architecture of public engagement on which CIDA’s popular support had rested. In 1992, the federal budget eliminated the National Advisory Committee on Development Education; the following year, he abolished CIDA’s Public Participation Program.29 The process accelerated under Liberal prime minister Jean Chrétien, was reflected in cuts to such groups as the Inter-Church Coalition on Africa, and culminated in the outright hostility toward many aid NGOs expressed by Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper’s government. International development minister Bev Oda’s elimination of funds to the NGO coalition KAIROS, and then to the Canadian Council for International Co-operation (an umbrella group gathering most Canadian aid NGOs), perfectly encapsulated the adversarial relationship between government and aid NGOs.30 Hapless CIDA officials could not heal the breach, nor were they able to defend their own agency from calls to merge it with the much larger Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, a merger accomplished in 2013.

In our closing chapters, three veteran political scientists address in more detail these recent evolutions. Laura Macdonald, whose work has long been anchored in an activist commitment to justice in Latin America, ties Canadian aid to Ottawa’s changing foreign policy priorities. As historic diffidence toward the region gave way to curiosity and interest in the 1960s, economic considerations, she argues, were clearly the most predominant and consistent influences on aid levels and policy. Yet, like McKercher, Macdonald is alive to other factors at play, especially a tradition of strong civil society linkages. Initially manifest in French-Canadian missionaries, secular North-South social networks flourished after 1970 as Canadian relations with South and Central America became highly politicized during the later years of the Cold War. While a search for economic advantage continued to shape Ottawa’s aid policies in Latin America, especially under prime ministers Mulroney and Harper, sustained civil society engagement also mattered. This was true even as Harper’s Conservative government merged CIDA with the foreign and trade department, and sharply reduced its traditional mechanisms for civil engagement.

CIDA's merger with the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) is at the core of David Black’s discussion of aid to Africa in the 1990s. Poverty and close ties with Canada (through the Commonwealth and La Francophonie) made sub-Saharan Africa CIDA’s largest aid recipient, giving it an outsized role in buttressing CIDA’s raison d’être, which was more fragile than ever. The challenges were threefold. Echoing many of our earlier chapters, Black underlines the continued uncertainty generated by the competing political, economic, and moral motives for Canadian aid. A failed experiment in decentralizing operations in the late 1980s, and Massé’s embrace of neo-liberal economic policies, further eroded CIDA’s sense of mission, rendering its “organizational essence” incoherent. When Chrétien’s finance minister Paul Martin took the axe to its sub-Saharan African program in 1995, cutting it by 20.5 per cent over three years, he stripped CIDA of its vision for the future, leaving it defensive and risk averse. Unable to recover, CIDA was ripe for a takeover. In July 2013, Canadian aid operations were folded back into the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade. It was 1950 all over again.

Appropriately, our final chapter by Stephen Brown heads back to the future, revisiting Keith Spicer’s Samaritan State in search of contemporary lessons. Two stand out. First, like Spicer and many more recent aid theorists, Brown is distrustful of aid’s capacity to promote democracy and stability. Indeed, he goes even further, rejecting the power of aid’s symbols and recipient country gratitude. The proof, he sharply points out, is scattered like litter across Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya. Rather, and more modestly, Brown echoes Spicer’s view that aid produces contact, engagement, and understanding, giving donors a tool to conduct more effective diplomacy and better contribute to international order.

Second, Brown embraces Spicer’s preoccupation with policy coherence, insisting that there need be no contradiction between Canada’s long-term interests in global order and the developing world’s interest in poverty reduction. Trouble arises when the search for short-term donor benefits—Canadian arms sales to Saudi Arabia or petroleum exports in an overheated world—trumps what we know to be in our long-term enlightened self-interest.

Development fashions have shifted considerably in the decades covered by this volume. Technical assistance gave way to megaprojects, which were eventually followed by waves of enthusiasm for the “basic needs” approach, for gender and development, and for sustainable development, all the way to the more recent UN-led Sustainable Development Goals and Canada’s new stress on “feminist international development.” Yet the basic theories around social change, modernization, and economic growth underlying the global development project have remained, leaving much of the ideological leadership with Northern actors.31 Is ODA, then, destined to always remain a form of Northern economic dominance of the Global South? And has Canada acted in coercive, perhaps even imperialist, ways in doling out its meagre aid allotments?

Increasingly, the answer is in the affirmative. In his recent renewal of Cranford Pratt’s “dominant class” thesis, for instance, political economist Jerome Klassen has argued that Canadian foreign policy, including aid, is driven by a capitalist model that has locked Canada into a US quest for global dominance.32 In this view, Canada and its leading capitalists act along with Washington in co-imperialist ways toward the Global South. Todd Gordon offers another view of Canada as imperialist, but in ways that are not reliant on American leadership: Canada is an imperialist in its very own right.33

This book’s chapters largely reject such deterministic models. They broadly accept the view that Canadian aid aimed to promote Ottawa’s foreign policy goals, including the country’s economic interests. Canada was clearly no Samaritan state. Yet the state hardly acted autonomously in shaping aid policy. Most chapters in this collection are rooted in detailed archival research, the valuable essence of the historical method, and explore both the broad motives and particularistic characteristics of aid operations. Most uncover meaningful limits on the Canadian state’s autonomy to pursue imperialist objectives, including Southern resistance and preferences, the ideological choices of individual bureaucratic and political policy makers, corporate priorities, and the important role of civil society in advancing alternative views to influence state strategies. Indeed, Pratt already observed in the 1980s the beginning of a “counter-consensus” driven by non-governmental organizations.34 That counter-consensus and the ways it interacts with government policies have developed considerably since then.

Together, the chapters in this volume offer a mixed view on the effectiveness and coherence of Canadian ODA over its seven-decade history. They note substantial shifts: aid, once “tied” entirely to the purchase of Canadian goods and services, is now untied and, in theory, more flexible and effective. Its implementation has slowly shifted toward centring Canadian NGOs in a more dynamic partnership between government aid strategies and NGO agents contracted to deliver it.

There are also considerable continuities, not all of them reflecting well on Canada. Trade motives were central at the start of Canadian ODA, with hopes that newly independent countries in Asia and later Africa might develop into more prosperous trade partners for Canada. Trade motives have not vanished; indeed, they made a comeback starting in the 1980s and culminating in a controversial push by the Harper government for coordination between Canadian aid and Canadian mining investments in the Global South. The early favour shown to non-communist countries as aid recipients during the Cold War is a thing of the past, but alignments between aid and strategic goals remain in today’s “global war on terror.” Canadian aid, too, flows disproportionately to countries with strong domestic lobbies in Canada, such as Haiti and the Ukraine.

On the brighter side, a renewed call to centre women in the “feminist international assistance policy” announced in 2017 by international development minister Marie-Claude Bibeau has promising echoes of CIDA’s one-time stress on gender and development themes and civil society strengthening, though it is curiously uninformed by these historical forerunners and surprisingly under-resourced for such an ambitious program.35 Canada has moved through new policies and new priorities in its ODA policy over the decades, with aid reviews perhaps even more common than foreign policy reviews, but coherence has long been lacking. Indeed, the repeated reviews and policy twists have themselves reduced coherence and thus effectiveness. The chapters in this book suggest that ODA has been formed in part from the dialogue between government and a civil society community engaged in development that the government has both sought to foster at times and undermine at others.

As a percentage of Gross National Income, Canadian ODA now stands at 0.26 per cent, less than half of its 1970s peak and well below the average for all donor states.36 Ambitious positioning of Canada as global leader is undermined by the scant resources allocated. Still, Canadians see their country as generous and sympathetic, and Canadian governments have never ceased to be major players in global development debates. This book seeks to contribute to those debates by historicizing and nuancing Canadian involvement in development. Canada emerges neither as heroic do-gooder nor as imperialist exploiter. Rather, it occupies a more ambiguous position that has both reflected and shaped global trends in development thought and practice.

Notes

1 For a historiographical overview that laments the past focus on the North Atlantic and lists some of the newer literature, see David Meren, “The Tragedies of Canadian International History,” Canadian Historical Review 96, no. 4 (Winter 2015): 534–66.

2 See, for instance, Ruth Compton Brouwer, “When Missions Became Development: Ironies of ‘NGOization’ in Mainstream Canadian Churches in the 1960s,” Canadian Historical Review 91, no. 4 (Dec. 2010): 661–93.

3 For an overview of recent literature on development history, see Joseph Hodge, “Writing the History of Development (Part 1: The First Wave),” Humanity 6, no. 3 (2016): 429–63, http://humanityjournal.org/issue6-3/writing-the-history-of-development-part-1-the-first-wave/; and “Writing the History of Development (Part 2: Longer, Deeper, Wider),” Humanity 7, no. 1 (2016): 125–74, http://humanityjournal.org/issue7-1/writing-the-history-of-development-part-2-longer-deeper-wider/.

4 Keith Spicer, A Samaritan State? External Aid in Canada’s Foreign Policy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966).

5 Cranford Pratt, ed., Canadian International Development Assistance Policies: An Appraisal (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994). Pratt lectured at Makerere University in Uganda in the mid-1950s and served as the first principal of the newly founded University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania between 1960 and 1964.

6 David Morrison, Aid and Ebb Tide: A History of CIDA and Canadian Development Assistance (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1998).

7 The Canadian Network on Humanitarian History has worked to make some of these records available. See aidhistory.ca for information on the network.

8 Spicer, Samaritan State, 3.

9 Jessica Reinisch, “Introduction: Relief in the Aftermath of War,” Journal of Contemporary History 43, no. 3 (2008): 371–404; Reinisch, “‘Auntie UNRRA’ at the Crossroads,” Past and Present 218, Issue supp. 8 (2013): 70–97; Suzanne Langlois, “‘Neighbours Half the World Away’: The National Film Board of Canada at Work for UNRRA (1944–47),” in Canada and the United Nations: Legacies, Limits, Prospects, ed. Colin McCullough and Robert Teigrob (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2016), 44–81.

10 A Report on Canada’s External Aid Programmes 1965–66 (Ottawa: External Aid Office, 1966).

11 On “organizational essence,” see David Black in this volume and Marie-Eve Desrosiers and Philippe Lagassé, “Canada and the Bureaucratic Politics of State Fragility.” Diplomacy and Statecraft 20, no. 4 (2009): 659–78.

12 Max F. Millikan, “An Introductory Essay,” in Richard N. Gardner and Max F. Millikan, eds., “The Global Partnership: International Agencies and Economic Development,” International Organization 22, no. 1 (Winter 1968): 2, 6.

13 Benjamin Higgins, All the Difference: A Development Economist’s Quest (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1992); and Economic Development (New York: W. W. Norton, 1968).

14 See, for instance, Ruth Compton Brouwer, Modern Women Modernizing Men: The Changing Missions of Three Professional Women in Asia and Africa, 1902–69 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2002); Gilbert Rist, The History of Development: From Western Origins to Global Faith, 4th ed. (London: Zed Books, 2014); and Joseph Morgan Hodge, Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2007). On planning, see, for instance, Louis J. Walinsky, The Planning and Execution of Economic Development (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1963).

15 Arturo Escobar, “Planning,” in Wolfgang Sachs, ed., The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power (London: Zed Books, 1992).

16 Eva-Maria Muschik, “Managing the World: The United Nations, Decolonisation and the Strange Triumph of State Sovereignty in the 1950s and 1960s,” Journal of Global History 12, no. 1 (March 2018): 122–44.

17 The voluminous literature on Kennedy-era modernization theory includes Michael Latham, Modernization as Ideology: American Social Science and “Nation Building” in the Kennedy Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and David Ekbladh, The Great American Mission: Modernization and the Construction of an American World Order, 1914 to the Present (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

18 Bruce Muirhead and Ronald N. Harpelle, IDRC: 40 Years of Ideas, Innovation, and Impact (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2010).

19 Nick Cullather, “Development? It’s History,” Diplomatic History 24, no. 4 (October 2000): 641–53; Rist, History of Development.

20 Morrison, Aid and Ebb Tide, 62.

21 On this approach to the study of international development organizations, see, among other sources, David Mosse, “The Anthropology of International Development,” Annual Review of Anthropology 42 (2013): 227–46. On shifting definitions of development, see H. W. Arndt, Economic Development: The History of an Ideal (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); and Ariel Heryanto, “The Development of ‘Development,’” Indonesia no. 46 (1988): 1–24, https://ecommons.cornell.edu/bitstream/handle/1813/53891/INDO_46_0_1107010934_1_24.pdf?sequence=1. Recent work on new agrarian development and health care includes Corinne A. Pernet and Amalia Ribi Forclaz, “Revisiting the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO): International Histories of Agriculture, Nutrition, and Development,” International History Review (2018), https://doi.org/10.1080/07075332.2018.1460386; Sunil Amrith, Decolonizing International Health: India and Southeast Asia, 1930–65 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Madeleine Herren, “Towards a Global History of International Organizations,” in Networking the International System: Global Histories of International Organizations, ed. Madeleine Herren (Heidelberg: Cham, 2014), 1–12; Marc Frey, Sönke Kunkel, and Corinna R. Unger, eds., International Organizations and Development, 1945–1990 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). The best history of CIDA remains Morrison, Aid and Ebb Tide.

22 Department of External Affairs, Foreign Policy for Canadians: International Development (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer, 1970), 7.

23 Ivan Head and Pierre Trudeau, The Canadian Way: Shaping Canada’s Foreign Policy, 1968–1984 (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1995), 161; Cranford Pratt, “Canadian Development Assistance: A Profile,” in Pratt, Canadian International Development, 5.

24 Cranford Pratt, Middle Power Internationalism: The North-South Dimension (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990).

25 William Easterly, The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists’ Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); Dambisa Moyo, Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2009); Rist, History of Development; Sachs, Development Dictionary.

26 Cited in Pratt, Canadian International Development, 348.

27 See http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/O-2.8/FullText.html.

28 Report to CIDA: Public Attitudes Toward International Development Assistance (Ottawa: Minister of Supply and Services Canada, 1988), 10, 19.

29 François Legault, “Development Education in Canada, Then and Now,” Hunger Notes, https://www.worldhunger.org/articles/us/deved/legault.htm.

30 “Declaration of the Voices-Voix Coalition,” 2010, http://voices-voix.ca/en/about/declaration.

31 Rist, History of Development.

32 Cranford Pratt, “Dominant Class Theory and Canadian Foreign Policy: The Case of the Counter-Consensus,” International Journal 39, no. 1 (Winter 1983/1984): 99–135; Jerome Klassen, Joining Empire: The Political Economy of the New Canadian Foreign Policy (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014).

33 Todd Gordon, Imperialist Canada (Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring, 2010); see also Todd Gordon and Jeffery R. Webber, Blood of Extraction: Canadian Imperialism in Latin America (Halifax: Fernwood, 2018).

34 Pratt, “Dominant Class Theory,” 100.

35 Bibeau was minister of international development from 2015 to March 2019.

36 OECD figures, http://www.oecd.org/development/development-aid-rises-again-in-2016-but-flows-to-poorest-countries-dip.htm.

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